This is how a progressive in 2014 can consider it an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for gay couples to be denied the right to marry — and base that argument on the claim that a gay man’s love and natural desire for another man, like a lesbian’s love and natural desire for another woman, is irreducible and ineradicable — and then insist just five years later that it is an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for anyone to be presumed a man or a woman at all.
As Andrew Sullivan has powerfully argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible. The first, which morally justifies same-sex marriage, presumes that biological sex and binary gender differences are real, that they matter, and that they can’t just be erased at will. The second, which Manjoo and many transgender activists embrace and espouse, presumes the opposite — that those differences can and should be immediately dissolved. To affirm the truth of both positions is to embrace incoherence.
The full article is archived, as least as of this writing, here. Another eye-popping passage:
Mary Pete is a neoliberal and a Jeffersonian meritocrat, which is to say he’s just another unrepentant or at least unexamined beneficiary of white male privilege…. Like Kirsten Gillibrand, he believes in “healthy capitalism,” which is a bit like saying you believe in “healthy cancer”: Yeah, you can (usually) treat it, but wouldn’t you rather be cured?
James Kirchick takes on the myth makers, including the Human Rights Campaign, writing:
Contemporaneous press accounts and the most credible scholarship both confirm that the crowd which partook in the Stonewall uprising was primarily not trans, female, and of color, but gay, male, and white. …
Put aside the question of whether the people described as “draq queens” 50 years ago would today identify as transgender (some might, many would still identify as drag queens, that is, gay men impersonating women)—by most accounts they were relatively few in number.
And yet, as Kirchick notes, we have the big lie perpetually repeated:
“Harassed by local police simply for congregating, Stonewall’s LGBTQ patrons—most of whom were trans women of color—decided to take a stand and fight back against the brutal intimidation they regularly faced at the hands of police,” asserts an article on the website of HRC.
He concludes:
What might have been a laudable effort to highlight the role of transgender people alongside gay people in a major historical event has been corrupted by an effort to expunge gay people, and gay men in particular, from that story. After the AIDS epidemic nearly destroyed a generation of gay men, the stealing of Stonewall amounts to a second erasure.
Academics also need to fight for robust biological-sex-based data, alongside data about gender identity, in order to properly track and analyse the multiple differences—physically, psychologically, socially, politically—currently statistically correlated with each sex. No doubt some of these differences are culturally and historically contingent, but something can be contingent, yet as obdurate as biological reality and so still be in need of study.
And she reports:
In my own case, I’ve experienced student complaints, FOI requests, campus protests, threats to milkshake me, the defacement of my office door, open letters to no-platform me, articles in the local press and student newspapers claiming I make the campus at my university “unsafe”, defamation by the Student Union Executive, an attempted smear campaign by academics at another institution, and various forms of student and public harassment. Occasionally, critics point to the fact that despite this I still manage to write and publish, suggesting that this gives the lie to any claim that I don’t have the freedom to do so. But I wonder how many gender-critical academics have been deterred from expressing their views by these tactics?
For the first time, we’re seeing a sharp drop in tolerance of “LGBTQ” people among the younger generation. …
Or check this out: 62 percent of young men regarded themselves as “allies” of LGBTQ people in 2016; only 35 percent now say the same — a near-halving of support. Women “allies” have dropped from 65 to 52 percent. The turn began in the year that the Obama administration — with no public discussion or congressional support — imposed critical gender theory on America’s high schools, determining sex to be whatever a student says it is. The imposition of trans ideology by fiat on the entire country’s young — along with severe public stigma for those with even the slightest questions — was almost textbook left authoritarianism. Well meant, perhaps. But dictatorial.
Even GLAAD, the culture police for the gay left, concedes that the transformation of the gay-rights movement into a trans movement steeped in critical gender theory in the past few years is likely the reason: “The younger generation was coming in contact with more LBGTQ people, particularly individuals who are non-binary and don’t identify simply as lesbian or gay.” GLAAD of course blames Trump, and social media, and vows to crack down ever more firmly on those who aren’t fully onboard with its agenda. The last thing GLAAD would do is ask itself if it is actually exacerbating the problem, and that the redefinition of almost everyone’s sex and gender to accommodate less than 1 percent of the population is why this resistance is happening.
Three Connecticut teenage girls filed a complaint with the @usedgov arguing that Connecticut’s policy on transgender athletes has disadvantaged them on the basis of their biological sex. #TitleIX#IWpolhttps://t.co/YNFHq0nLbS
Here’s another reason for the drop in support in the U.K.:
Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population. If one community is growing in size, and that community has 10 times the negative attitudes of the wider community, then it would ordinarily be thought inevitable that there will be some impact on the wider society’s attitudes towards the matter. Either because they influence the views of wider society or because as their proportion among the population increases so the representation of their views increases.
.@MrAndyNgo is an openly gay journalist. He was savagely beaten in the streets of a major American city, in broad daylight, by a mob. Have any mainstream LGBT groups spoken up for him?
I've heard that Ngo deserved what he got b/c he wrote pieces debunking false hate crimes, thus making ppl feel "unsafe." (Shouldn't it have the opposite effect?) Anyway, if journalism on that topic is to become physically unsafe, let's share while we can https://t.co/7i2WGhdbNL
Mike, Andy Ngo was brutally assaulted by a terrifying mob—but you seem to see it as a joke—or something he brought on himself. Very distressing to see such biased reporting in @nytimes. This sort of reporting fuels skepticism about the press. @ByMikeBakerhttps://t.co/c5LAnYebCV
Log Cabin Republicans denounces attack on gay journalist @MrAndyNgo and the silence from Gay, Inc. – thanks to @RichardGrenell and @tedcruz for calling for a federal investigation into this act of violence. https://t.co/L5JBCXM8UZ
If you’re wondering why so few Democrats condemned Antifa’s Saturday attack on journalist Andy Ngo in Portland, in January of last year, the Washington Free Beacon reported “[Democratic Deputy Chair Keith] Ellison Posts Photo of Himself Posing With ‘Antifa’ Handbook, Says It Will ‘Strike Fear’ in Trump.”
Update:
This should NOT have taken this long. They issued a statement after major criticism for ignoring violence on an Asian conservative; and calls for the @IRStaxpros to take away their tax exempt status for being totally partisan. https://t.co/tjEfDx0HWC
A culture that once preached individuality and personal freedom has become conformist and hectoring, its self-appointed queer commissars constantly policing the language and bringing pressure to bear on those who run afoul of their ever-evolving standards.
And, tellingly:
When I asked the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s leading gay-rights group, for statistics on the number of LGBTQ people annually denied employment, housing, or service at a hotel or restaurant due to their sexuality or gender identity, the group was unable to provide me with any. Most social movements are able to identify the extent of the problems they seek to address.